Along that fifty-mile stretch of coastline were concentrated all the people of the Court and the capitalist bourgeoisie. That strip of land was home to the comings and goings of an elite who had, a few years earlier, developed a taste for the seaside, spending their afternoons in the sun at private clubs with swimming pools. They went from Rabat to Skhirat, from the Sable d’Or beach to the Bouznika beach, from the Fedala casino to the Corniche in Casablanca. Restaurants, run by Spaniards and Frenchmen, served grilled fish, which the customers ate with their fingers while drinking low glasses of tannic wine that made them fall asleep in the afternoon. On those terraces the air was scented with grilled garlic, fried fish, and orange zest. Jazz songs and French chansons played in back rooms and the laughing customers, knowing every word, sang along.

  * * *

  • • •

  If a stranger had entered Monette and Henri’s beach hut one summer evening in 1969, he might well have been surprised to see such a motley bunch assembled under the same roof. Some of the guests had come from the palace while others came from nowhere and had no tribe, no support, no money. A student union leader, married to a bookseller from Lille, rubbed shoulders with a rich industrialist from Casablanca, a pro-Palestinian Jewish student, or a young mathematics prodigy from Sidi Kacem. Men who orbited circles of power drank with men who wanted to overthrow them. Lower-middle-class students, the sons of artisans or shopkeepers, imagined that they would one day become ministers and have a house with a swimming pool in a chic part of Rabat. They all had one thing in common, however, something that was still unusual in that new country. They had been to college, and that gave them the right to dream of a radiant future.

  One night Aïcha met Ahmed, a close friend of Monette and Henri’s, who kissed her hand and introduced himself. A man in his early forties, Ahmed had graduated from a prestigious engineering school in Paris. After returning to Morocco he had been recruited by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Originally from Fès, the son of an illiterate shopkeeper, Ahmed told her how he had received a grant from the nationalists. “When I left home I still had a guern—that braid of hair that some boys wear at the back of their shaved head. I had some old sirwal pants and a linen shirt. When I arrived in Rabat to take the train and then the boat, I used my savings to pay for a haircut. Then I bought some new clothes. In not much more than a quarter of an hour, I had entered the modern world.”

  There were not many women among Henri’s students. When Aïcha saw Ronit, she immediately recognized her as one of the girls in the photograph Monette had sent her. Ronit was small and slim but as soon as she appeared in a room she seemed to magnetize all the male attention. She was beautiful, of course, with her tanned complexion, her gray eyes shaded by false eyelashes, and her long hair, which she kept tied in a ponytail that hung halfway down her back. But what drew men to her was her self-assurance, her sense of humor, the way she would snap her fingers, wink, flash a lopsided smile. Ronit was Jewish, from an extremely strict Orthodox family that lived in the mellah of Fès. She had run away from home at sixteen, leaving her parents shattered by the scandal, and had begun by taking refuge with some cousins in Essaouira before settling in Casablanca. She lived above a garage with her brother, and even though everyone knew she was so short of money that she had to work a number of crappy jobs, she never complained and always bought a round of drinks. Aïcha was impressed by the way she dressed. Ronit would take old kaftans and shorten them, using thick leather straps to tighten them at the waist. She wore raffia sandals, like the Rif peasants, and Aïcha thought her the most elegant woman she had ever seen. Ronit hated Marxists, whom she accused of blindness and complicity with the crimes of Stalin and Mao. She was particularly vituperative about Abdellah and his group of long-haired boys. Abdellah was a green-eyed Slaoui who claimed that one of his distant corsair ancestors had abducted then married an Icelandic woman. He wore flared jeans that were too tight around the thighs and garnet-colored ankle boots of which he was as fond as he was of the portrait of Che Guevara that hung above his bed. Ronit spent her time mocking him. “You think we’ll still be able to live like this when your communist friends are in power? Go on, piss off somewhere else to have your revolution!” Everyone thought Ronit and Abdellah were sleeping together. At night, when the air was less humid and people gathered under blankets in little groups, Ronit and Abdellah would always be in a corner of the garden together, and everyone could hear the boy laughing at Ronit’s taunts. He adored her.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ronit placed three bowls on the kitchen countertop. In one she put olives, in the second pieces of cucumber, and in the third some still-warm grilled peanuts, so salty that they gave you a stomachache. On the terrace the boys grabbed cans of beer from an icebox and sucked up the foam that poured out when they were opened, running down over their chins. “Look at those hypocrites,” Ronit said to Aïcha. “They say they’re in favor of women’s liberation, that they’re not like their fathers. I bet you as soon as they’re married they’ll all expect their wives to forget their diplomas and become good little housewives again.”

  “We’ll need some help around the house!” Ronit yelled at the men, who ignored her. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” she asked Aïcha, who was busy slicing the saucisson she had brought with her from Alsace. “Is it true what they say about the pill?”

  “What do they say?”

  “You know! That it makes your hair fall out, gives you cancer, and that it can sometimes make you infertile.”

  “I don’t think they know much about science if they’re saying that.”

  “Do you take it, then?”

  “What? The pill?”

  “If it’s not harmful, why don’t you take it yourself?”

  Ronit did not wait for Aïcha to reply. Abdellah had come over to nibble some saucisson and pick a fight with Henri.

  “Did you know that Roland Barthes is going to teach in Rabat?”

  “Everyone knows that,” said Henri. “It’s all they talk about at the university.”

  “It’s unbelievable. The country’s on the verge of revolution, the people are living in poverty, and Monsieur Roland Barthes is going to pay us the honor of teaching us Proust and Racine! What the hell do Moroccans care about Proust? We wear your clothes, we listen to your music, we watch your films. In the cafés of Casablanca, young people read Le Monde and bet on horses racing in Paris. When are we going to understand that we need to develop our own personality, understand our own culture, take control of our own destiny?”

  “What would you prefer?” asked Ahmed. “Don’t tell me you’re like those people in the Istiqlal Party who want Quranic schooling, total Arabization, and a return to traditions that are basically nothing more than folklore for tourists?”

  “Don’t put words into my mouth! The truth is that the government has no interest in educating the masses. As long as Moroccan students are taught by young Frenchmen on military service, the education they’ll get is colonial and bourgeois and they’ll keep on defending their class interests. I’m not saying this about you, Henri. You’re different. But you must agree that your French colleagues only come here for the money.”

  “I think that’s a little unfair,” their host replied. “We’re here to pass on our knowledge, and to help Morocco train its future elite—the people who will take control of the country.”

  “The elite? Oh, give me a break! Every year this country breeds millions of illiterates to work in the fields, clean the streets, shoot rifles. The elite, as you call it, has a responsibility. We need to go to the factories, organize evening classes, raise awareness among the masses!”

  Ronit stood up on top of the counter. “Ugh, you’re ruining the party with your boring speeches! Why don’t we go to a club? I want to dance!”

  * * *

  • • •

  They went dancing every night in the clubs along the coast. Sometimes they would drive as far as the Corniche in Casablanca and strut their stuff in one of those establishments that, fifteen years earlier, would have had signs on the door announcing: “No Moroccans.” By the edge of the world’s biggest swimming pool, girls in bikinis took part in beauty contests and were named Miss Tahiti or Miss Acapulco. They went to concerts by groups who modeled their style on French pop or American rock. The Moroccan singers would slick back their frizzy hair with brilliantine and rent sequined jackets from a boutique in Maârif. All night long, at Le Balcon, Le Tube, or La Notte, Henri and his friends would wiggle their hips to songs by Elvis Presley or The Platters and slow-dance to Gilbert Bécaud. At dawn they would walk to a stall where an old man fried sfenj, Moroccan doughnuts, which he rolled in sugar and hung from strings. The young people devoured these sweet treats and licked their fingers afterward, their lips gleaming with grease.

  * * *

  • • •

  Aïcha did not dance. Nor did she take a drag on the joints that were passed from hand to hand, leaving all the others red-eyed. She often stood apart from the rest of the group and thought about Karl Marx. There was still no sign of him. Every day she hoped he would knock at the door of the hut or appear suddenly on the beach. Her heart raced whenever she thought she had spotted him, but there were lots of men with thick beards and long hair and her disappointment would bring tears to her eyes. She wondered if he and Henri had argued or if he had gone off somewhere to write and she would never see him again. At night, when her bedroom window banged in the wind and she shivered with cold, she imagined that he had been arrested or had disappeared. Ever since she had been here she had heard so many tales of kidnappings, conspiracies, and arrests, and she wondered if Mehdi could be involved in that sort of thing.

  One afternoon, as the three of them were finishing lunch, Henri stood up and announced that he was going to Rabat to do some shopping and make a few telephone calls. They had tried to have a phone line installed at the beach hut, but without success. “And maybe I’ll drop in on Mehdi. You remember Karl Marx?” he asked Aïcha. “I was the one who gave him that nickname.”

  Aïcha looked up at him, wide-eyed. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask him. Where was Mehdi? Why didn’t he come to see them? Was he okay? But in the end she just replied: “Yes, I vaguely remember him.”

  “He accepted a job as an assistant lecturer at the university in Rabat. I warned him against it. Since all the strikes began, it’s become almost impossible to work there. And with his qualifications he could easily get a good position in the government. But he’s obsessed with writing a magnum opus about the psychological consequences of underdevelopment. If he thinks he’s going to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, he’s kidding himself.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That afternoon, as he drove toward the capital, Henri remembered how he had almost left Morocco in 1964, only a few months after his arrival. He had packed his suitcase and called the dean of the university to inform him that this was not the life he had come looking for. He had left his ex-wife, his family, his dull friends. His life in France had been so gray and insipid, it had made him feel as if he had already entered the corridor of his own decline. But he hadn’t fled all of that only to find himself in a land of fire and blood, a country where his own students could be killed in front of his eyes. Today he had no regrets about his decision to stay. Had he given up and taken the plane back to France, he would never have met Monette, never have lived in the beach hut, never have enjoyed this life that was, he believed, the happiest and most beautiful imaginable. And it was precisely this happiness, the simple pleasures of his existence, that sometimes struck him as obscene, indecent. Because behind this floating bubble of bliss, behind the cheerful blue sky and the big yellow sun, he could feel the fear, the narrowing of souls.

  He was haunted by his memory of those days in March 1965 when hundreds of young students had invaded the streets of Casablanca to protest against a rule forbidding anyone over the age of sixteen from attending secondary school. Back then Henri still lived in the city, in the Gauthier neighborhood. He had seen them marching through the sunlit avenues to the working-class neighborhood of Derb Sultan. The boys had carried girls on their shoulders and they had yelled: “We want to learn!” “Down with Hassan II—Morocco doesn’t belong to you!” “Bread, work, and schools!” Joined by their parents, by the unemployed, by the poor people from the shanty towns, they had built barricades and set fire to buildings. The next day, Henri had passed the central police station and seen the crowd of parents, their faces pale with anguish, begging for news of their vanished children. Against the city walls of the new medina, hands tied behind their backs, schoolchildren had stood in line to be shot. Henri could still hear the sound of gunfire, the explosions of mortars, the screaming ambulance sirens. And, loudest of all, the blades of a helicopter from which, it was said, General Oufkir had fired bullets at the crowd below. In the days that followed, Henri had seen bloodstains on the cobbled streets of Casablanca and believed that the government had sent a warning to the masses. Here, we shoot at children. Law and order are nonnegotiable. On March 29, Hassan II had declared: “There is no greater danger to the state than the so-called intellectual. It would be better for you to be illiterate.” The tone had been set.

  Zippo was a tall Berber man with gray eyes and a bull neck who ran l’Océan, the best beach restaurant for miles around. He owed his nickname to the lighter he was constantly playing with: thumbing it open, snapping it shut, his hands smelling strongly of naphtha. That lighter had been a gift from some American soldiers who had been quartered at the Kenitra Air Base in the 1950s. “Fantastic guys with teeth so white they looked fake. I’d never seen such handsome, strong men before. Ah, America, what a place . . .” The soldiers had been crazy about him too. They played him the records they received one week after their release. Records by Elvis and Bill Haley, to which the young Zippo would dance, making the Americans laugh.

  Often Zippo would say: “I thank God I never went to college.” He was convinced that too much knowledge muddled the brain and he attributed his enormous financial success to his instincts. No need to study for hours every night to understand how to run his little restaurant and the nightclub next door. The key was simple: music. At l’Océan the jukebox blasted out hits all night long, at top volume. The music made the young people dance, dancing made them thirsty, and they ordered beers at the bar. The easiest equation ever. Zippo spent his nights trying to rouse his customers from their lethargy. He would walk over to tables where groups of shy, pimply boys stared silently at the dance floor, each of them slowly sipping from a bottle of Coke. He encouraged them to be bold, to make the most of their youth, to ask those giggling girls to dance with them. He monitored the entrance and was wary of the fistfights that would often break out around midnight. The Moroccans, he claimed, could not take their alcohol and would throw themselves at the pretty Spanish girls, only to be punched in the face for their insolence by the Spanish girls’ brothers. “You want independence? Go hunt on your own land, then, and leave our women to us.”

  On July 21, 1969, Henri, Monette, Aïcha, and the others were sitting on the terrace of l’Océan. Monette had convinced Aïcha to wear a figure-hugging white muslin dress. She had told her that she ought to make the most of her slim body, and she’d lent her some bracelets and a ring too big for her finger that Aïcha was afraid she would lose. She had tied her hair back to show off her suntanned face. During dinner Monette had encouraged her to drink some rum and Coke and promised her that there was nothing to fear from the drunkenness that started to loosen her gestures and turn her cheeks pink. They ate sizzling shrimp, grilled fish, tomato salad, and cumin-dusted sweet peppers. It was hard to have a conversation because the music was so loud and they soon left the table and headed for the dance floor. It was then that Aïcha saw him.

  In the middle of the crowd, Mehdi was dancing.

  To understand Mehdi, you had to see him dance. There was, in his gestures, in his movements, a sort of casual mastery. He appeared to abandon himself to the rhythm of the music, letting it guide and control him as if he were a puppet coming to life under an invisible hand. He closed his eyes, held his arms against his chest, fists balled, and became completely indifferent to the world around him. Then he opened his eyes again and stared defiantly at the other dancers. “Look what I can do,” his eyes seemed to say. He raised his right leg and began to do the twist. Now he was no longer in a nightclub on the coast but starring in one of those musical comedies he used to watch as a child, through the hole in the bathroom wall. He was Gene Kelly, he was Fred Astaire, dreaming that Cyd Charisse was making her way through the crowd to give him her hand. Aïcha watched him, fascinated. The jukebox played “The Great Pretender” and Mehdi danced alone, snapping his fingers in time with the beat, eyes lowered to the tips of his leather shoes. He was slim and graceful. Aïcha noticed that he had changed his glasses; the pair he was wearing now were more fashionable, with a thick tortoiseshell frame.

  Then the dance floor emptied. A crowd of customers were gathered around a television set. Zippo had agreed to put the television on the copper bar as long as people kept drinking and dancing. But the customers were staring at the screen, where the image began to flicker and then died. There were shouts of impatience. Someone said they should go up to the roof to check the antenna. When the first images appeared, a man turned the music down so they could hear what the commentator was saying. Everything had come to a standstill by now, and even the barmen, cloths hanging over their forearms, were watching open-mouthed as the American astronauts moved on the screen. The nightclub owner could no longer hear the music, he was no longer beating time with the tip of his shoe. He was just standing there, arms by his side, staring at these images that he could not help regard as diabolical. What was this witchcraft? Boxes that talked and showed pictures? Men flying to the moon? He shuddered and shook his head.